The oil and gas industry expends sizable sums to design cutting tools, such as downhole drill bits including roller cone rock bits and fixed cutter bits. Such drill bits may have relatively long service lives with relatively infrequent failure. In particular, considerable sums are expended to design and manufacture roller cone rock bits and fixed cutter bits in a manner that minimizes the probability of catastrophic drill bit failure during drilling operations. The loss of a roller cone or a polycrystalline diamond compact from a bit during drilling operations can impede the drilling operations and, at worst, necessitate rather expensive operations for retrieving the bit or components thereof from the wellbore.
Diagnostic information related to a drill bit and certain components of the drill bit may be linked to the durability, performance, and the potential failure of the drill bit. In addition, characteristic information regarding the rock formation may be used to estimate performance and other characteristics related to drilling operations. Logging while drilling (LWD) and measuring while drilling (MWD) measurements are conventionally obtained from measurements behind (e.g., several feet away from) the drill head. While a number of sensors and measurement systems may record information near the earth-boring drill bit, conventional polycrystalline diamond compact (PDC) cutting elements used in earth-boring drill bits do not provide measurements directly at the drill bit. The off-set from the earth-boring drill bit may contribute to errors for many types of measurements, especially those measurements that relate directly to the performance or the condition of the earth-boring drill bit itself.